When this Mrs. Geels passed away--before her time, as they say--Mr. Geels remarried, and his second wife bore him a son named John, who was, a retired CRC pastor in 1976, or so the magazine notes.
No, it's not Saskatchewan, although it could be. If you have any experience at all in the rural Midwest, that bare and endless prairie says Dakota.
It's Corsica, SD, on some holiday or another, probably the Fourth (note the platform up front and the crowd forming at bottom right. The ordered, center aisle parking may well have simply been the way it was done back then, but the promenade those Model Ts create suggest a town and a people proud of what they've grown in that empty land.
The steepled church just a block down Main is the local CRC. Another, half a block to the right. . .well, if you're following these at all, you can guess its identity because where two or three are gathered, in all likelihood there'll soon be two or three churches.
(It's the local RCA.)
And this is nowhere near Corsica. As the inscription makes clear, it's a log church. In Corsica a century-and-a-half ago, you would have to travel a considerable distance for logs. This is the place my dad grew up, at least that's what he used to tell me. He was a preacher's son in Lucas, Michigan, which is to say northern Michigan, a phrase that even feels cold, as it must have been when whatever filled those gaping cracks between the logs dried up and fell away.
No matter, of course. Just like the Catholics just up the block from where I live, one of the first orders of business in this new land was to construct a place for worship. Cold?--sure. But first things first.
Who knows what'll happen this year or the next, but for 75 years or so, forty percent of the CRC was Canadian. This young family in the Frazer Valley are "old-timers," immigrant Dutch whose roots were set firmly into gorgeous British Columbian land already a century ago. They're looking prosperous, aren't they? Of course, back then, before cell phones, a photograph was a rare and blessed thing.
For decades, the denomination didn't worry much about church growth as waves of immigrant Dutch came to Canada following the mess the Netherlands had become during and immediately after the Nazi occupation. Many of them--men and women--were or aided the Dutch Resistance. If you fought Hitler's henchmen, the perils of immigration didn't amount to much.
But then, his brother-in-law, same era really, stayed in his first charge for only two years also. What letters right here in my files suggest is that Grandma Schaap's professor father back in Michigan felt his sweet daughter simply way too far from civilization in a place called South Dakota. Why, they still had Indians out there!
This one yet, and I promise I'll quit.
If you're thinking some kind of prison camp, the smiles suggest otherwise. The pails--and that historic vacuum--suggest a cleaning detail, an army of Dutch-American women armed for battle against dust and dirt and whatever foul agents stand in their way, cleanliness being right there beside Godliness.
It's an army of church women ("Onward Christian Soldiers) from the CRC in Highland, Indiana, circa 1925, on their way to clean the church.
Despite the smiles, no editor would put this shot on the cover of any magazine today because it testifies, some would say, to the exploitation of women, who were considered worthy of getting down on their knees to scrub sanctuary floors, but little else in the church.
Some, I'm sure, would consider the photo demeaning, even repugnant.
We live in a different world today, a world where the church's history can no longer include the dreams of strangers in a strange land. Our history is still our history, but we can no longer own it.
And that's a good thing, because an fortress whose walls are built of ethnic tales has no future in a multi-cultural world. But it's a bad thing too because a people without story is not a people at all.
The people who sent me a manilla envelope full of old Banner covers were right--they knew I'd like them. I did and do, and I hope you did too.
But now I'll do what they couldn't and slide them into the wastebasket because while they sure enough do tell our story, that story can feel blushingly self-centered, seeking only its own, featuring only its own and, in the telling, marginalizing all others.
Even if it is no longer the story of a church, a denomination, it's a human story. I can't help but think we imperil our future by not telling it.
No matter--the whole bunch are going in the wastebasket. Still, somewhere, I know, a library has digital copies.
They exist. So does the story.
1 comment:
I'm impressed that you mentioned Saskatchewan, and yes, the photo could be in some place there. I was born and raised in Saskatchewan.
Interesting that ca 40 per cent of the CRC was Canadian for a time. I don't know the numbers now, but I think the CRC is quite a small denomination today in Canada.
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